I want to be termed middle european! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Genghis Khan, also spelled Jenghis Khan, Jinghis Khan, Chinghiz Khan, Chingghis Khan, etc., original name Temüjin, also spelled Temuchin Nearly got it right. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
und & vlad: Both of you have highlighted one crucial point, and that is the lack of clear, common definiton of what is western and inded the west on a dialectical level, since noone can decide upone which parameters to base any such definition. und: well indeed, I feel that vlad has fallen into the trap of perceiving + hence believing that all value ascribed characteristics are somehow inextricably linked to the notion of "the west". However you did say: hence you make the fallacious assertion that hungary's "backwardness" can be measured with regards to the "west" or indeed by how much it may or not be perceived to be "western". und: my friend I'm suprised you of all people have said such: "Analysis of DNA from modern humans supports other indications that a northward migration of farmers from ancient Turkey and the Middle East, beginning around 9,000 years ago, shaped Europe's genetic geography."—Bruce Bower, Science News, June 24, 1995 http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/1095/9510040.htm so how far back do you want to go? white with regards to phenotype? then yes off course. Peoples accross the range of anthropological classes contain within them peoples who have "white" skin colour. white meaning some bullshit association with western europpean? then no. no, he needs to stop hating himself and stop trying so hard in adopting some ambiguous vague cloudy psuedo defined notion of "western" culture and embrace his true european culture, and not fall into the trap of equationg all european as western. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
hence you make the fallacious assertion that hungary's "backwardness" can be measured with regards to the "west" or indeed by how much it may or not be perceived to be "western". Of course I did because that Hungarian believes that the West is the highest level of development, so I told him straight, your culture, your society compared to the west is backward. So do you really want to be compared to the West? I didn’t perceive or suggest the west was the absolute best, but he did so he got his just deserves. so how far back do you want to go? Well obviously before the Minonian society Europe was barbarian compared to the Middle East, but post Rome once Europe got its identity, those who were not there during the formative years are not imo to be considered European. white with regards to phenotype? then yes off course. Peoples accross the range of anthropological classes contain within them peoples who have "white" skin colour. white meaning some bullshit association with western europpean? then no Turks are arguably white, so are Chinese, but I am talking about Western European white. Just because your skin may be perceived as white, doesn’t mean you are. his true european culture, and not fall into the trap of equationg all european as western. That’s a bit much, his culture cannot be true European, since the foundations are Asian.
We all immigrated from Africa, so what does that mean? Cultures did not exist always, they were grown out of distint, enviromental, and cross cultural factors.
und: LOL!! if your skin is white there is no perception: you are white yes...if whiteness in attributed to western euro then any such perception is false...boht by the attributer + that who perceives/wants to be "western euro"
if you're skin is white there is no perception: you white White has many connotations. Surely like I said it could be said that white can be many things to many ppl. But to me white has much more then just a physical attribute. We live in a world with western definitions, don’t we? yes...if whiteness in attributed to western euro then any such perception is false...boht by the attributer + that who perceives/wants to be "western euro" So then wouldn’t a Chinese person who calls themselves Yellow be committing the same sins? Or an Arab in Sudan who is really black? These terms are arbitrary and are left up to interpretation, I recognize that an Inuit could be called white, but they don’t even call themselves that. White has more then mere physical connotations obviously. what is true european? Imo...the Basque, the Celts, and the Greeks.
und: indeed, therin lies the problem. indeed, therein lies the problem. well yes, since white has now been inextricably associated with "western european"....again therein lies the problem. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! therin lies the bloody problem.
basques: indo-eurp / central asia http://www.fact-index.com/b/ba/basque.html celts: indo-euro / central asia greeks (Etruscans + Pelasgians) : http://www.applet-magic.com/etruscans.htm this is slightly more uncertain...but ultimately i'd put my money on central asia ne c'est pas? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
well yes, since white has now been inextricably associated with "western european"....again therein lies the problem. I don’t think that’s a problem personally, white is not the world. About the Basque being Central Asia that’s B.S no one know where they came from, and their language closest to the MAYA!
Traditionally "western" means europe and "eastern" means asia, period. "Eurasia" was the only known world at the time. America and Australia are considered western countries because they were colonised by europeans. Even though australia is geographically as "eastern" as asia. I agree those hairy yugoslavian types seem like they should be called something other than western, but what are you gonna do?
Geeze, you guys really like to argue. What's the big deal? The terms "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" were constructs of the Cold War era. Now it's just "Europe" and in a few more years it will all be the EU. Yes the Magyars are the descendants of one of the many waves of Mongol tribes who set off to explore the world and sometimes conquer it. But they intermarried with every tribe they met along the way and by the time they arrived at what we consider their final desination their gene pool was just about as shaken and stirred as the rest of us. The Finns and their close cousins the Estonians have a very similar history, as do the Huns whom the Magyars replaced in Hungary except for its name in our language. (They call it Magyarorszag.) The Tatars, the Moghuls, and the Manchurians were also Mongol tribes, and there were several others, not all of which are remembered by history. But arguably most famous are the Ottomans. Not only did their Mongol ancestors intermarry with every Indic, Iranian, and Semitic tribe they encountered along the way, but they even adopted the Muslim religion. They left in their wake Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, all nations of the new "Turkic" ethnic group speaking Turkic languages. (And possibly the remote Chinese province of Xin Jiang with its Muslim population, somebody can check me on that.) The Ottoman Empire ruled the Middle East for the better part of a millennium until the early 20th century, when they fell back to just Turkey itself. Yes, the Ural-Altaic, Finno-Ugric, and many other language families have been proven to be related, including according to some scholars Korean and Japanese. Given enough millennia, agglutinative, inflected, polysynthetic, and all the other types of languages can, apparently, eventually evolve from each other. Using research only recently made possible by massively parallel computing, most linguists now seem to agree that there is only one "Eurasiatic" language family. Results still being cranked out by that ongoing research lead to a tantalizing hypothesis that humanity has in fact only one language family -- we developed language before we left Africa and in fact language may have been one of the key accomplishments that gave us the ability to ultimately adapt to and thrive on every significant land mass except Antarctica. I hadn't read about the link between Basque, a pre-Indo-European language, and Maya, an Athabascan language. But if the new computer-enabled scholarship works out the way many of us expect it to, it's no surprise for absolutely any language to be related to absolutely any other. As for tossing around the term "Eastern Europe" as if the boundary defined by the old Iron Curtain had any significance before WWII or after Perestroika, don't forget that Europe's first university was built in Praha and that Kopernik was Polish. Now if you're really interested in tracing an ethnic group with a truly misty history, try the Bulgarians. The original Bulgars were not an Indo-European people and I don't know what they in fact were. But they adopted the Slavic language of their new homeland for no reason I can find except sheer convenience, and they now regard themselves as the most Slavic of Slavs. Much of their history seems to have been based on the desire to simply get along. They had a continuous monarchy for about a thousand years. They were so loyal to their friends the Soviets that their mail wasn't even censored during the Communist years. Today they complain that the Russians insisted that they live under a communist dictatorship and now the Americans want them to live under a captialist democracy, when all they really yearn for is reestablishment of their happy kingdom!
Actually, Magyars are cousins of Estonians and Finns. They were not mongol. They came to Europe long time before Mongols appeared as a tribe. Bolgars came to Bolgaria from the land somewhere on Volga (great Russian river). Actually, tribe was divided in two half: first moved to the modern Bolgaria. Second half stayed in place to be anihilated by Mongols in 13th century.They are called Volga Bulgars by historians. Bolgar were loyal to Russian/Soviet? LOL. That is why they fought against Russian/Soviets in WWI and WWII. Probably, to pay back for the liberation in 1878 from Turks. They fought 2 nasty Balkan wars too in 20th century. To get big piece of neighbor's land, not to get along. They were victorious in the first one, but greed made a bad joke on them. In the second war they've lost all conquests and more. I really do not think Bolgar had tzar (not a king for 1000 years). Cause they've imported a German prince to be their tzar/king shortly after liberation of Bolgaria by the Russian army in 1878.
Thanks for the info. ColdSiberia.org agrees that there was no Mongol cultural identity prior to Jingis Khan. (I suspect the spelling "Chingis" is a holdover from the old Wade-Giles transliteration system.) It states that the Huns, already a distinct people, built the first "Mongol" city around 200BCE, and that the Turkic peoples also were already in existence. The communists didn't take over the Bulgarian government until after WWII, like the rest of the Warsaw Pact nations. I traveled in Bulgaria in the 1970s and I found genuine affection for the Russian people, certainly more than the Czechs and Hungarians mustered after their failed anti-communist revolutions, and even more than that of the Romanians who did not have a failed revolution to be angry about. I had Esperanto pen pals all over the Eastern Bloc but only the Bulgarians assured me that their postal service would deliver bibles, pornography, or worst of all anti-communist propaganda, serene in the conviction that their people were "uncorruptible." The older Bulgarians I met personally stuck to this story with a passion, explaining that once the enmities of WWII faded away, they were left with a deep sense of gratitude for that very liberation from the Ottomans of which you speak. Fighting for territory became the Olympic sport of the Balkan region in those days and the Bulgarians were not immune to the fever. To this day there are people in western Bulgaria who call themselves Macedonians. Considering that Balkan Fever touched off WWI, it's no surprise that it also infected the Bulgarians and dragged them into the region's frequent donnybrooks. Yes my chronology was off because I glossed over the Ottoman occupation. It stands to reason that they might have brought in a German monarch, as so many other European nations have throughout history, to ensure the competence of their new government.
Fraggle Geeze, you guys really like to argue. What's the big deal? The terms "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe" were constructs of the Cold War era. Now it's just "Europe" and in a few more years it will all be the EU. Eastern Europe has always been a construct, before the Cold war. There is a difference btwn Western Europe and that of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe was stagnate due to non-European invasions, and rulers. From the Magyars in Hungary, Russians from Russia, the Ottomans from Turkey, etc. They had the misfortune of being located where they were. The West the modern west when through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, liberalism, and the industrial revolution. These things largely escaped the Eastern Europeans, because their leaders where staunchly conservative. The Cold War era merely amplified the differences btwn the two. As for tossing around the term "Eastern Europe" as if the boundary defined by the old Iron Curtain had any significance before WWII or after Perestroika, don't forget that Europe's first university was built in Praha and that Kopernik was Polish. Like I said Eastern Europe has now been defined rather definitively, but it has always existed. As for the first university are you sure it wasn’t in Italy?
Well it's certainly difficult to resolve this controversy using the Internet. One site says it was in Prague in 1402. One says it was in Italy in the middle of the 11th century, another says it was in Italy at the very beginning of the 11th century. Then there's another website that says the first university in Europe was established in Greece in 387 BCE. Apparently there's no standard definition of "university." Just a continuum from academies through colleges through universities with very little difference between each one and the next. But I think you're right. The evidence points to Italy long before the Renaissance. I just wonder what kind of "classes" could have been taught in a "university" during the Dark Ages, when the Crusades were in full swing. Let's see: bibilical studies, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic (biblical languages), Latin (the language of the church and contemporary bibles of the era), bibilical art, working in stained glass, hymns and chants, making a habit, prayer, collection and payment of tithes, persecution of non-Christians, identification and execution of witches, geocentric astronomy, self-flagellation, the geography of a large flat surface... well I guess it must have been a pretty full and exciting curriculum.
